Sayid: Communication as Control and Connection

(A copy & paste of an old post) 

I was reading a book called “Seven Life Lessons of Chaos” and a particular passage made me think of Sayid. (I highly recommend this book btw.) Here’s an edited version of the passage: “The predicament of all life is uncertainty…Humans feel this more keenly because our consciousness causes us to remember disasters of the past…We dream of eliminating uncertainty by conquering and controlling nature. The ideal of ‘being in control’ is so much a part of our behavior that it has become an obsession, even an addiction.”

The first two things I thought about connecting Sayid to this passage is that of all the characters, he probably has more memories of day to day disasters, and that his whole demeanor is one of control (at least on the surface). I think for example of one of my favourite recent exchanges between Sayid and Jack over Naomi’s phone in which Sayid acknowledges Jack’s anger and then goes on to say that he (Sayid) will be happy to apologize later but right now they have to talk about getting off the island. I think even the way Naveen Andrews delivers most of his lines gives this sense of someone keeping himself in check (maybe conveyed by the  precision of his pronounciation?). I think more than Jack, Sayid represents that ideal of the rational, unemotional quest for truth/reality as a way to save oneself from danger/violence. And given his backstory as a soldier and what life must be like growing up in Iraq under Hussein, it makes perfect sense. So Sayid keeps emotions in check in order to make language/communication as objective as possible. His main tool of control is language/communication. This all seems a worthwhile endeavor until one realizes that his role as a torturer is just an offshoot of that same ideal (and an interesting commentary on rationales justifying torture). In this rationale, torture is a means of controlling dangerous situations through controlling the language/information/truth of another. Think of the oft-cited “there’s a bomb about to go off” scenario in which torture would be used to find out where the bomb was and defuse it, with the assumption that torture yields truth. What has to be controlled in the torturer is any emotional  response—especially any empathy with the person he tortures. Which actually brings me to the second way in which Sayid relates to language/communication—not as control, but as connection. (This is what is so great about the characters on this show—the way   they contain their own contradictions!) That process is proably exemplified by his connection to Shannon through translation  (language as exchange). What is ironic is that that connection again makes him vulnerable to the random nature of violence. And I  think his torture of Ben after Shannon’s death can be interpreted as a return to the ideal of control of violence through torture—the control of information.

One other thought on this subject–I know this has been pointed out before, but Sayid’s namesake, Edward Said (pronouned the same way) is relevant here. Said’s theory is that conquering groups misrepresent those they conquer as complete opposites—for example, the way in which Manifest Destiny rationalized taking land from Native Americans because they were an emotional, child-like and simple people who needed someone to take their land away from them and use it properly. Sayid does this same kind of misrepresentation with Sawyer as a justification for torturing him. But the writers show us the connection in their shared violent pasts and the way in which both resist being placed back in the role of victim by becoming the victimizer.